This article provides a technical overview of the Linux operating environment and compares and contrasts it with the Solaris Operating Environment (Solaris OE). The purpose of this article is to quickly familiarize advanced system administrators with the Linux OE and to provide a reference for Solaris to Linux usage. This article is for intermediate and advanced readers who are experienced with the Solaris OE and are tasked with deploying, servicing,maintaining, and using Linux-based systems.

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This article provides a technical overview of the Linux operating environment
and compares and contrasts it with the Solaris Operating Environment (Solaris
OE). The purpose of this article is to quickly familiarize advanced system administrators
with the Linux OE and to provide a reference for Solaris to Linux usage. This
article is for readers who are experienced with the Solaris OE and are tasked
with deploying, servicing, maintaining, and using Linux-based systems.

The Linux information in this article is based on Redhat Linux 8.0 running
on Intel architecture hardware. Because the core of all Linux distributions
is essentially the same, most of the material here can be applied to any distribution.
It is presented as a comparison to Solaris on SPARC® hardware, although
there are some references to Solaris x86.

This article contains the following topics:

"Linux Origins"

"Software"

"Hardware"

"Kernel"

"Networking"

"System"

"About the Author"

"Related Resources"

"Ordering Sun Documents"

"Accessing Sun Documentation Online"

Linux Origins

Linux is considered a UNIX® like operating system, primarily because no
part of it was derived from the source tree of either AT&T or BSD UNIX.
It originated as a project in 1991 by Linus Torvalds, then a college student
at the University of Helsinki in Finland.

Linus' name is not pronounced "Ly-nus," but rather
"Lee-nus." Consequently, Linux is pronounced "Lee-nucks,"
but in the U.S., it's more commonly pronounced "Lin-nucks," with
a short "i" sound. Note that "Ly-nucks" is generally
considered an incorrect pronunciation.

Linus wrote his kernel from scratch, using minix as the initial environment
to develop his kernel. Minix is a free operating system used primarily as an
educational tool to teach about operating systems. Linus soon expanded the
kernel, posting the source code to the Internet and, before long, others began
to add support for file systems and hardware.

Today, Linux has the same features as those found in other modern UNIX
operating systems features such as priority scheduling, virtual memory, and
multithreaded processing. It runs on 16 different architectures, including
Intel, SPARC, and PowerPC. It has support for over 30 file system types, and has
drivers for over 1800 hardware components. It uses software from the open-source
GNU project as its operating environment.